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arXiv:1205.5479 · New Journal of Physics

Beating noise with abstention in state estimation

B. Gendra, E. Ronco-Bonvehi, John Calsamiglia, R. Muñoz-Tapia, E. Bagán

Published Oct 16, 2012• 16 citations

Abstract

We address the problem of estimating pure qubit states with non-ideal (noisy) measurements in the multiple-copy scenario, where the data consist of a number N of identically prepared qubits. We show that the average fidelity of the estimates can increase significantly if the estimation protocol allows for inconclusive answers, or abstentions. We present the optimal protocol and compute its fidelity for a given probability of abstention. The improvement over standard estimation, without abstention, can be viewed as an effective noise reduction. These and other results are illustrated for small values of N . For asymptotically large N , we derive analytical expressions of the fidelity and the probability of abstention and show that for a fixed fidelity gain the latter decreases with N at an exponential rate given by a Kulback–Leibler (relative) entropy. As a byproduct, we give an asymptotic expression in terms of this very entropy of the probability that a system of N qubits, all prepared in the same state, has a given total angular momentum. We also discuss an extreme situation where noise increases with N and where estimation with abstention provides the most significant improvement as compared to the standard approach.

DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/14/10/105015

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The main goal of quantum metrology is to obtain accurate values of physical parameters using quantum probes. In this context, we show that abstention, i.e., the possibility of getting an inconclusive answer at readout, can drastically improve the measurement precision and even lead to a change in its asymptotic behavior, from the shot-noise to the Heisenberg scaling. We focus on phase estimation and quantify the required amount of abstention for a given precision. We also develop analytical tools to obtain the asymptotic behavior of the precision and required rate of abstention for arbitrary pure states.

The problems of optimally estimating a phase, a direction, and the orientation of a Cartesian frame (or trihedron) with general pure states are addressed. Special emphasis is put on estimation schemes that allow for inconclusive answers or abstention. It is shown that such schemes enable drastic improvements, up to the extent of attaining the Heisenberg limit in some cases, and the required amount of abstention is quantified. A general mathematical framework to deal with the asymptotic limit of many qubits or large angular momentum is introduced and used to obtain analytical results for all the relevant cases under consideration. Parameter estimation with abstention is also formulated as a semidefinite programming problem, for which very efficient numerical optimization techniques exist.

We derive an analytical formula for the optimal trade-off between the mean estimation fidelity and the mean fidelity of the qubit state after a partial measurement on

N

identically prepared qubits. We also conjecture an analytical expression for the optimal fidelity trade-off in case of a partial measurement on

N

identical copies of a

d

-level system.

Reliable characterization of quantum states and quantum processes is central to the development of scalable quantum computing. Standard characterization techniques such as full quantum state tomography become rapidly impractical as system size increases. In this work we present two software-oriented fidelity estimation protocols that avoid full tomographic reconstruction while remaining experimentally relevant for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. The first protocol is direct fidelity estimation (DFE), where the fidelity between a target state and an experimentally prepared state is estimated from importance-sampled Pauli measurements. The second protocol is a survival-probability-based method that reconstructs fidelity from experimentally accessible moments of a noisy evolution and its approximate inverse, and is intrinsically robust against state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) errors. We discuss the theoretical basis of both approaches, analyze their noise sensitivity, and present numerical evidence on representative multiqubit states under depolarizing, dephasing, and amplitude-damping channels. For DFE we show that attenuation-aware correction improves robustness against measurement noise. For the survival-probability approach we show that an

L_2

-optimized expansion substantially outperforms naive Taylor truncation in high-noise regimes.

We analyse the reconstruction of an unknown pure qubit state. We derive the optimal guess that can be inferred from any set of measurements on N identical copies of the system with the fidelity as a figure of merit. We study in detail the estimation process with individual von Neumann measurements and demonstrate that they are very competitive as compared to (complicated) collective measurements. We compute the expressions of the fidelity for large

N

and show that individual measurement schemes can perform optimally in the asymptotic regime.

We investigate the asymptotic relationship between quantum cloning and quantum estimation from the global point of view where all the copies produced by the cloner are considered jointly. For an N-to-M cloner, we consider the overall fidelity between the state of the M output systems and the state of M ideal copies, and we ask whether the optimal fidelity is attained by a measure and-prepare protocol in the limit M -> \infty. In order to gain intuition into the general problem, we analyze two concrete examples: i) cloning qubit states on the equator of the Bloch sphere and ii) cloning two-qubit maximally entangled states. In the first case, we show that the optimal measure-and-prepare fidelity converges to the fidelity of the optimal cloner in the limit M -> \infty. In the second case, we restrict our attention to economical covariant cloners, and again, we exhibit a measure-and-prepare protocol that achieves asymptotically the optimal fidelity. Quite counterintuitively, in both cases the optimal states that have to be prepared in order to maximize the overall fidelity are not product states corresponding to M identical copies, but instead suitable M-partite entangled states.